I will confirm this has been my personal experience. I'm an amateur who flailed about for quite a while trading this stock and that stock, mostly counter-trend trading. Sometimes I'd find that trading a certain stock again and again, I got to "know" it and could almost extract money from it at will. After experiencing this often over time, I realized that if I focused on a very narrow group of stocks that fit my personality (which is ADD, requiring quick decent moves for me to trade in and out of), I could make trading a predictable source of income. I finally broke through a major set of barriers recently. I'm now a trend-follower and breakout trader who trades 4 stocks 95% of the time with an occasional outlier when I see something interesting hit the hi/lo ticker. My next goal is to transfer my overall trading skills to CL and possibly trade it exclusively. In my sim account, CL has been a serious outperformer.
I had several live ES trades, a few very nice ones. But overall I was cutting all my winners near break even only to see them later move nicely my way. I simply couldn't get comfortable with ES's personality. I trade it almost every day in my sim account, however... ...someone on ET was trading crude oil and I brought up a chart one day quite some time ago and found it to be not only one of the smoothest trading instruments I'd ever seen, but one that gives you a VERY quick response. There's rarely a lot of gnashing of teeth and wringing of hands while you're in a CL trade (though there certainly might be afterwards). Anyone following my live sim trades in CL Redux can see that usually by the time I've posted an entry, my stop is already moved to break even because the trade's moved 10 ticks my way. So right now I see CL as my eventual full-time trading partner. All I need to do is "just do it!". I have a terrible time making changes, and my stock trading is working quite well. But I believe that my move to the next level in trading will come out of CL.
You focus on one to learn the personality of it. Even among the indexes the TF, is different than the ES, and both are much more different than CL or GC.
Hell yeah. Comparing ES to TF to CL to GC is like comparing apples to oranges to motorcycles to hovercrafts You can apply the same principles to trading them, but until you really get to know them you are just going to get chopped up to shit.
All prices trade the same, If you are learning to trade the right way. If you are learning to trade off of bid/ask marketmaker's "tell" , thats definately one instrument limited only, but if iyou learn price action, all prices trade the same because all price is based on human behavior, and human behavior is the same in all instruments. the only difference between each instrument is risk/reward ratio. ------- having said this, I don't trade 10 instruments either, max 2 on my screen, there needs to be concenratration to do it correctly, play chess against the future moves of what you are trading.
Tnx for all the comments. Looks like I will have to become a specialist gynecologist at FESX now for a while, been trading also ES after US market open but will skip that for now. CL and 6E seem to provide some nice moves with big RR but maybe not focus on them yet so much.
I'm surprised noone even mentioned timeframe as a serious factor. If one is trading on 5min charts holding for 1-2 hours max. then price action is very similar on all charts, and the small differences among those can be learned pretty quickly, ie. non significant. If your holding period is several days or weeks, then obviously you need to understand the underlying instrument well, ie. fundamentals. Thus specialization/no specialization is dependent on the timeframe one uses and not the instrument.